OK, thought this might be of interest to some here...

Last night I needed to stay in London. Because of a number of factors, I held off booking until a few days before. Shopped around and couldn't see anything that looked like a good price.

Priceline wasn't bringing anything back for me (must say I bid aggressively as I want a significant discount for not knowing where i'll end up & possibly having single beds in the room).

I looked on lastminute.com - they have some "top secret hotels" but by digging through the descriptions it's often easy enough to figure out which properties they are. The night before the Hilton Islington was going for £69 incl taxes, but no great deals for Thursday night.

So we get to yesterday morning and still nothing booked. I did a quick trawl of the chain hotel websites and www.holidayinn.co.uk proved to be my saving grace.

At around 7am, the Mayfair property and the one up on Carburton Street were both offering their leisure saver rate - £130/£115 respectively incl tax and breakfast. Note this wasn't available the previous day as the best I could get at Mayfair was £180 (using a members club disount I have) plus 17.5% excluding breakfast.

I went back about 10am to book the Mayfair property - this had gone, but the Crowne Plaza in The City had come up on the leisure saver rates - £128, again incl tax and breakfast.

This is a lovely property - the location's not great for everyone although it's close to St Pauls & the Tate Modern, and was also convenient for my meetings.

I knew airline inventory management was very dynamic but i'd never seen anything like this in the hotel sector before.

Marriott weren't budging on rates by the way - I kept checking and even called the hotels up direct, but no luck at all...

Anyway, hopefully someone will make use of this in the future.